The cannoli incident

[jere7my]

Wednesday, July 1 - Florence

We ate a lot of big meals in Italy. On our first full day in Florence, we decided we would skip one — we'd had an excellent late lunch of fish kebabs and bruschetta at Zà Zà, and a huge amount of pizza and mozzarella the night before with Dan C. and family. A big dinner just did not appeal. adfamiliares had been craving cannoli ever since we touched down in Rome, and every time we'd gone looking for a pasticceria it was after dinner and they were closed. So we took a pass on dinner and went directly to dessert.

We found a pasticceria with cannoli on the menu and ordered two at the counter — they seemed a little pricy, but hey, when would we be in Florence again? The fellow told us he'd bring them out to us if we'd sit down, so we did, at a table on the little cobblestone street.

After a few minutes of people-watching, we began to wonder what was taking so long. It was a sweaty evening, and all we had to drink was the thick, piping hot cioccolato adfamiliares had ordered. "Well, they have to fill them to order, so they don't get soggy," we said, feeling knowledgeable. Five minutes after that, we began joking that maybe they had to milk the cow to make the ricotta to fill the cannoli.

So we were a little tetchy when the waiter finally emerged. With a flourish, he deposited before us two big, steaming plates of cheese-stuffed pasta, swimming in meat sauce. We started to protest, "No no no!" but then the bottoms dropped out of our stomachs as it hit us: we hadn't been saying "cannoli." We'd been saying "canneloni." The menu said "canneloni." The waiter had, quite properly, brought us due canneloni.

We'd prided ourselves on escaping the clueless tourist stereotype — made an effort to communicate in Italian, covered our shoulders and legs in the churches, didn't get huffy when restaurants charged for water. Just that morning we'd had a little laugh at the expense of the British woman at breakfast who ordered caffè americano and told us about the "hard little slices of bread with nuts in" she'd gotten at dinner the night before. (She meant biscotti.) And there we were, nine hours later, stammering over two hot plates of canneloni while the waiter tried to figure out why we were unhappy.

We explained as best we could, and told the reluctant waiter it was our mistake and we would of course pay for the meal, and unenthusiastically tucked in. We were saved by the graciousness of the waiter, who reemerged, before we'd had two bites, with takeaway boxes and plastic forks, telling us how nice the canneloni would be as a picnic tomorrow. (They did, in fact, make a perfect lunch in our hotel room the next day.) Abashed, we crept away, certain that we'd been outed as ugly Americans before every real Italian person in Florence.

The next day, we saw the graffito above. Either it was a coincidence, or the couple stifling their laughter at the next table had a can of spray paint in their bags.